What is a Data Breach?
Data breaching occurs when unauthorized people unethically access sensitive data to manipulate or exploit it. It can significantly impact an organization’s reputation, disturb routine operations, and compromise customer experience.
Moreover, information theft can cause serious problems for businesses, governments, and individuals. Essential cybersecurity steps are important to restrict cyber attacks and prevent financial losses.
Stay informed and vigilant. This article provides practical steps to help you safeguard against these threats and mitigate risks posed by social engineering and other tactics.
Why Data Breaches Occur
Table of Contents
Business companies that want to break the glass ceiling in the digital world need to know the reasons why malware attacks and data leaks occur. This section elucidates a variety of reasons stemming from a daunting combination of technical loopholes, human error, and malicious attempts. Let’s decode them.
Financial Gain
Data breach incidents often occur for financial purposes. It is a primary motivation for malicious data breaches. Hackers sneak into the deep financial details including credit card numbers, financial transaction data, or other information regarding financial accounts.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) Theft
Some cyber attackers pilfer PII such as social security numbers, and other phone numbers for identity theft, loan approval, and opening dubious credit cards in their victim’s names. This rich data is a goldmine for hackers to misuse and even sell on the dark web for nefarious gains.
Hacking to Steal Valuable Information
One of the key reasons for data breaches is hacking using brute-force attacks, ransomware and malware infection. Hackers can easily steal prized information once they gain unauthorized access to systems. They may utilize the precious data to harm the victim for evil purposes.
Insider Threats
Another most overlooked form is insider threats. It can be equally disastrous as external breaches. Multiple inside elements including employees, contractors, or different business stakeholders who have access to confidential data may misuse their authority. They may leak this data either unknowingly or intentionally to malicious powers for viscous gains.
Phishing Attacks
Tricking individuals into revealing their sensitive data such as sign-in credentials, or monetary information by impersonating a credible entity is counted as a phishing scam. Cybercriminals often use phone calls, text messages, or emails with attached links to deceive victims. Once they get trapped, hackers get total control over their devices to use data for evil intentions.
Various other types of attacks that occur are as follows:
- SQL Injection
- System Vulnerabilities
- IT Failures
- Physical Security Compromises
What are the Notable Data Breach Incidents?
Let’s go through the data breach events history has recorded for you.
Yahoo Breach
In 2013, Yahoo faced one of the most brutal data breaches when hackers underwent vulnerability exploitation in the company’s cookie system. The purpose was to access sensitive data including birthdates, user names, email IDs, and passwords of around 3 billion Yahoo account users.
TJX
The 2007 TJX Corporation breach incident was one of the costliest data breaches in US history. This event compromised the data of around 94 million customers. As far as the financial damage is concerned, it was more than USD 256 million. Hackers secretly planted traffic sniffers on the wireless networks to divert all the captured information to them.
23andMe
23andMe conducts genetic testing. Hackers attacked its highly sensitive and vulnerable data. This attack stole the data of 6.9 million including family trees and DNA data. Using credential stuffing, hackers breached user accounts on different platforms. The victims were those who reused the same username and password.
Equifax
In 2017, cybercriminals attacked the credit reporting firm. It breached the data of more than 143 million US citizens. An unpatched vulnerability in Equifax’s website helped criminals gain access to the network, stealing credit card details, driver’s license numbers and more. The estimated financial loss was USD 1.4 billion.
SolarWinds
Russian cyberattacks intruded on a supply chain by hacking the software vendor SolarWinds in 2020. Hackers covertly monitored the platform to distribute malware to the software. Russian spies gained access to various sensitive US government agencies, including Treasury, Justice and other State Departments.
How to Prevent Data Breach Incidents?
According to the IBM Data Breach Survey Report, it takes around 272 days to track and contain an active breach across different industries. Deploying the right security solutions can help to respond to the key IT challenges being faced by Chicago businesses. Let’s understand the standard measures and advanced best practices to mitigate breaches before hefty damages.Deploy Response Plans
According to a report published by Cost of a Data Breach, the maximum-security investment is in incident response planning. It brings light to the damage repair by adopting well-established incident response plans. Organizations can easily control breaches using this technique.Use Data Security Tools
Business companies can deploy different data protection tools to automatically track and classify sensitive data. It is one of the most practical cybersecurity solutions. Organizations can also apply encryption, and other protections for real-time insights, data breach notification and optimal results.Compliance Regulation
Vulnerable data is now easy to protect from data breach incidents by complying with different regulations including GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and HIPAA. These compliance regulations not only protect users from data breaches but also help them with effective risk management.Apply Data Encryption
Apply strong passwords and other data encrypted methods including MFA, single sign-in and other identity and access management (IAM) techniques. The encrypted accounts are safe from credential theft and other data-based intrusions. Businesses can also enforce role-based access controls to restrict hackers from illegitimate activities.Staff Training Program
Organizations need to train their employees to help them timely recognize and avoid data breach attacks. It not only prevents unexpected data breaches and data leaks but also reduces the risk level. The security of confidential information is a driving force in the digital world. With the right security plans to prevent malware attacks, and other data breach incidents, businesses across all industries can safely and easily operate.Friendly Asked Questions
Where can I check if my data has been breached?
There are different online tools and service providers to crawl data leaked from any potential breaches. It helps you access the list of organizations that expose your details.
What are the results of data breaches?
A data breach event can expose your highly sensitive information causing hefty regulatory penalties, corporate financial losses, and reputational damages.
Who is liable for data breach?
An entity that fails to execute safeguards required by reasonable security measures is responsible for data breaches. Additionally, it involves an entity that failed to mitigate the damage level once the breach occurred.
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